1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to media accelerators and more particularly to accelerating video decoding capability of hardware through the use of a software model.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is known to provide a computer system with a media accelerator for decoding and processing video data. Video data may conform to video standards such as, for example, the Windows Media Video Version 9 (WMV9) standard.
When designing a media accelerator, it desirable to optimize the video decoding functionality of a media accelerator for a plurality of video standards (e.g., MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, etc.), each of which may require a different approach for optimization. For example, to optimize the performance of a media accelerator with the WMV9 standard, it is necessary for the media accelerator's compliance with the WMV9 standard to be verified using a plurality of video streams that are then decoded using the media accelerator design. In this way, a media accelerator may be said to be compliant with a particular video standard.
In general, there is a typical latency involved with Audio-Video syncing (AVSync), so it is desirable to have a video decoder process video information faster than the desired frame rate. For example, normal video viewing speed is 30 frames per second (fps), so a typical goal would be a video processing rate resulting in 35 fps for a full-resolution, D1-sized (720×480 pixels) video window, such as commonly implemented in the NTSC video standard, or as encoded on a Digital Versatile Disk (DVD), at a bit rate of 2 Mbps. Furthermore, it may be necessary to take different approaches to accelerate the video decoding of different video standards.